Music: Emel Mathlouthi, a Tunisian voice that counts

After the album Ensen in 2017, Emel Mathlouthi comes back to us with Everywhere We Looked Was Burning*. The muse of the Tunisian revolution of 2011 thanks to her song “Kelmti horra” (“My word is free”), sometimes presented as the hymn of the moment that triggered the Arab Spring, the artist was invited to the ceremony. presentation of the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo in December 2015 to the National Dialogue Quartet. She performed this iconic song there. This course, Emel Mathlouthi does not deny it. But since then she has followed a path never straight, made of bifurcations, never where she had been left, where you thought you would find her.

A journey made up of personal quests

Whether she performs all over the world, from Tehran to New York, or receives the Khalil Gibran Prize, which each year rewards in the United States personalities who embody the values ​​of the Lebanese poet, the artist has developed, stubbornly, his singular universe. It would have been easy to believe that this new album would struggle to match the outcome and the sumptuousness of the previous one, Ensen. But then came the listening and the obvious. Everywhere We Looked Was Burning shows that the steep and demanding artistic path that Emel Mathlouthi has chosen to follow is always astonished at his ability to always renew without repeating itself. Ten pieces where melodies, arrangements, voices mingle to form an invitation not to a flat journey, but to a stroll.

Awakening too, alert, because the title sounds like a solemn warning, a statement. It is the world as it is going badly that seems to be the common thread of the album. Land sacked, humanity massacred, wandering and flight. Yet the album is by no means dark; rather meditative. Emel Mathlouthi seems to have drawn her music directly from the sounds of the world; telluric force as on the track “Footsteps”; mechanical moloch rhythm on “Womb”; human heart that jumps with fear on the track “Merrouh”, a song inspired by the Syrian exodus; surf on “Does Anybody Sleep?” “; dawn dawn with a voice in slow amplitude on “Rescuer”. And always these electro jerks which pose a restless layer on which the voice of the singer hovers, murmurs, and broad inspiration. Powerful beats, haunting trip-hop, robust melodies and this voice, the voice of Emel Mathlouthi, always so pure. The organic of the voice and of the instruments also mixes with the electronics of the samples and the throbbing groove, without the fusion ever colliding. A contrast of lights, baroque or abstract images, sounds which inevitably catch from one end of the album to the other.